The Ins and Outs of the Jains in Tamil Literary Histories

J Indian Philos (2011) 39:599–646 DOI 10.1007/s10781-011-9125-0 The Ins and Outs of the Jains in Tamil Literary Histories Christoph Emmrich Published online: 19 April 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract The Jains and their texts play a key role in the literary histories of the Tamil-speaking region. However, in their modern form, dating from 1856 to the present, these histories have been written almost exclusively by non-Jains. Driving their efforts have been agendas such as cultural evolutionism, Dravidian nationalism or Sáiva devotionalism. This essay builds on ideas articulated by the contemporary Tamil theorist K. Civatampi, examining how various models of periodization have frozen the Jains in the ancient past. Further, it will explore how this unfolding historical drama, which gloriously climaxes in Tamil literature, has attributed the Jains, as dramatis personae, merely a role in early Jain texts; their role as communities transmitting these texts has been ignored. In contrast to this typical pattern, this article will also introduce a literary history written in 1941 by the Jain A. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r (1880–1960). It will explore whether or not his voice, which emerged from within the same academic community contributing to the strange absence of Jains in the contemporary awareness of Tamil literary, was successful in finding another way for Jains of being heard, and for non-Jains, of listening. Keywords Cakravarti Á Tamil literature Á Historiography Á Jains Introduction The origin of modern studies on Tamil literary history was recently described as having occurred in the 1880s through the ‘‘discovery’’ of a Tamil text, the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i (Swaminathaiyar 1907), which was subsequently edited and translated by U. Ve¯. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar (1855–1942). This text had not been previously C. Emmrich (&) Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 123 600 C. Emmrich known to ‘‘Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar and others whose literary education was shaped by late-medieval Hindu culture,’’ but supposedly it was ‘‘revered and actively studied’’ by the Jains of the Tamil-speaking region. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar ‘‘sought [these] out and cultivated relationships with’’ them, and with their help he familiarized himself with 1 the text. The Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i was the first of a vast number of texts that were examined and worked on in the following decades, in what was to be called the ‘‘Tamil Renaissance’’. The field of what could now be called ‘‘Tamil literature’’ (tamil ilakkiyam) expanded thereby dramatically, these texts forming the basis upon which writing a ‘‘history’’ (varala¯-ru) of Tamil literature became a cultural project of paramount importance. But as so often with narratives concerning origin, upon closer look this one, too, seems to have had a transparent strategy. Older historical relationships are loosened by the drama of the new2 and lost within it, and topoi and old roles are reformulated. An example, to mention only one of the many we shall encounter in this short study, is the selflessly resourceful and procuring Jain who helps the earnestly seeking Tamil realize his under-acknowledged greatness. Dis- regarding whether this is true or not, I will take this little story as a starting point to examine how the Tamil Jain was given this role, as well as several others, in the process of Tamil literary history being written, and how, in turn, this may have influenced how the Tamil Jains were understood. And reversing this narrative, without attempting to make it more true that way, I would also like to examine how the story might have unfolded if it had been recorded how the Jain felt to have works he may or may not have been familiar with, may or may not have considered ‘‘his own’’, ‘‘discovered’’ by a modernizing Tamil elite, who attributed these works to the Jain community, and yet appropriated them in the effort of ‘‘extending the horizon of the Tamil literary past’’ (Cutler 2003, p. 272). How would a Jain have understood his role in that moment, the birth of Tamil literary history, and how would he have come to terms with the dramatic development of the academic genre in the hands of authors who had various private agendas? Is there reason to suspect that the history of modern Tamil literary historiography, from its beginning, whenever that was, was marked by non-Jains progressively writing the Jains out of Tamil literary history? And did their exclusion become more noticeable and com- prehensive, the more sophisticated and thorough the mechanisms for including them became? Giving them the complex roles to be explored in this study, roles, which were not theirs to chose or reject created the semblance of their inclusion while 1 This is discussed by Norman Cutler (2003, pp. 272–275) on the basis of Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s 1958 autobiography En-- Carittiram. For bibliographic details, see Cutler (2003, p. 272, n. 3). For the most recent re-evaluation of Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s autobiography, see Monius (forthcoming), in this journal issue. 2 That the text must have been part of a much older informal Tamil literary canon is proven by the fact that as early as 1868, a section of it was commented upon and translated into English by H. Bower and Muttaiya¯p Pil:l:ai. Also there were several plans for an edition of the work (by G.U. Pope, W.H. Drew, ¯ A-rumuka Na¯valar and Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s teacher Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaram Pil:l:ai), although none of these cases materialized (Zvelebil 1995, pp. 170–171). Ca¯mina¯ta Te¯cikar’s early eighteenth century invective against a whole range of Jain (and Buddhist) works, including the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i and the Cilappatika¯ram (Zvelebil 1992, p. 147), would only make sense if already at that time these works were regarded highly, at least by some scholars. This could, of course, also suggest that in that historical context, the status of these later canonized works was at least somewhat ambiguous and contestable, or possibly represented the projection of an alternative, ‘‘negative’’ or ‘‘other’’ canon. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 601 excluding them as the agents of their own history. There are many reasons for such suspicions. These include attempts, even if well-meaning, to attribute ancient, un-dateable texts to the Jains (their ill-defined nature allowing attributions to be more freely made), the omission of entire literary genres from historical accounts (such as, above all, the Jain commentarial tradition), the complete absence of any reference to Jain literature that was written after the seventeenth century, and the overwhelming chorus of non-Jain voices when it comes to writing about Jain literature in Tamil. I would like to map the position of the Jains in the writings on the history of literature in Tamil3 and shall do so in three steps: First, by investigating the role played in Tamil literary histories by Jains, Jain authors, Jain texts, Jain institutions and, most crucially, ‘‘Jainism.’’ I will do this by looking at where Jains have been placed in time, as well as how their role in textual transmission is described. I will refer thereby to the first Tamil author to have analyzed the development of the ‘‘history of literature’’ or ‘‘literary history’’ in Tamil, Ka¯rtike¯cu Civatampi, with his 1986 Literary History in Tamil (Sivathamby 1986), and will try to expand on his ideas. Secondly, I will examine the roles attributed to the Jains within these narratives: what the Jain looks like when he appears as an actor on the stage of Tamil literature, and what story he is called on to tell. For this I am indebted to Stuart Blackburn and his article, published in 2000, ‘‘Corruption and Redemption. The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History,’’ in which he analyzes how the ‘‘outsider,’’ in this case the Paraiyar, the Untouchable, is utilized to tell a particular kind of literary history (Blackburn 2000). In these first two steps, the focus is on non-Jain Tamil literary historians and their view of the Jains. Then, in a third step, I will take the opposite perspective and look at a particular history of literature in Tamil written by the twentieth century Jain scholar Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r. His Jaina Literature in Tamil, published in 1941 and revised and reprinted in 1974 (Chakravarti 1974), examines Tamil literature from a Jain perspective, focusing exclusively on Jain works in Tamil, their authors and sup- porting institutions.4 He sees Tamil literary works as part of a larger Jain literary culture, as documents attesting the degree to which the Tamils, unknowingly, have taken part in the wider world of Jain culture. 3 In the readings done for this study, I have constantly come across a group holding a very similar position to that of the Jains, namely, the Buddhists. Many of the issues raised in this paper regarding the Jains could also be raised for the Buddhists in the same way. Nevertheless, there are crucial differences in how the two groups have been seen historically, as well as in medieval literature and in modern schol- arship (on this, see Monius 2004a, b). Although elaborating this contrast would clarify the Jain position further, I have decided not to include this aspect here. This may be somewhat justified by the fact that my primary scholarly interest lies in living Tamil Digambara Jain communities, including their texts and histories.

Load more